Politics-Free Licence ;)

Chris DiBona cdibona at gmail.com
Thu Jun 28 15:35:03 UTC 2007


I haven't yet seen why we'd want yet another corner case license.
Every new license osi approves as subscribing to the osd adds to the
confusion and difficulty that new developers and companies face when
using open source and worse yet means yet another largely incompatible
potential pool of code.

I don't see anything in your license that would tell me it could
capture more than an impossibly small fraction of developers and be
worth the time it would take to evaluate it.

I know that sounds hard, and I apologize to the original author, but
this is something I don't think we spend enough time discussing the
damage yet another open source license does overall.

Chris

On 6/28/07, Smith, McCoy <mccoy.smith at intel.com> wrote:
> Isn't a choice of jurisdiction (and venue) clause necessarily a
> political choice?  I.e., how likely is it that programmers in the
> Western Hemisphere or in Asia are going to want to use this license, if
> in order to enforce it they would need to retain counsel and file suit
> in England/Wales?
>
> It seems to me that if you want maximum uptake on an open source
> license, you'd leave out jurisdiction and venue clauses.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Nicholas Cole [mailto:nicholas.cole at gmail.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, June 27, 2007 11:56 PM
> To: license-discuss at opensource.org
> Subject: Politics-Free Licence ;)
>
> I'm a licence newbie, I'm afraid.  Nothing in this email is intended
> to start a flame-war!
>
> I am neither a lawyer nor a programmer, but I have some python code I
> want to release and was looking for suitable a "share and share alike"
> licence for it.  I found it surprisingly hard.
>
> The following licence is intended to have three features lacking (for
> my purposes) in the GPL:
>
> [1] It more clearly defines what a 'derived work' is.  Most of the FSF
> discussion I could find concerned C code, and was in any case external
> to the licence.  I've tried to codify what I take to be the common
> position, and make it clear how this would apply to an interpreted
> language.  It is this part of the licence I'm most interested in
> getting feedback on.  I'm still not entirely happy with the wording.
>
> [2] It specifies a jurisdiction.
>
> [3] It is intended to be shorter than the GPL.  It doesn't contain the
> preamble, and sticks to just defining the terms rather than explaining
> their rationale.  I've therefore cheekily christened the licence the
> "Politics Free Licence".  My major reason for doing this was just to
> have a shorter, easier to read text.  Neither the name, nor this
> aspect of the licence is intended to take sides in the ongoing flame
> war on the Linux kernel mailling list. :)
>
> Any feedback or suggestions would be very welcome.
>
> Best wishes,
>
> Nicholas
>
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